Van Gogh and After

please join me in welcoming today's speaker claude trinity thank you for this introduction thank you for the invitation to come here and thank you everyone for coming I'm going to begin a little uncharacteristically for myself by apologizing and I'm apologizing because I will not be pronouncing the artists name correctly if I do I say van hock I will develop a sore throat very rapidly and will be unable to finish the lecture so I will be using the American pronunciation van Gogh I hope you all forgive me for that but I've explained why so van Gogh an artist that we all revere probably one of the most popular in the history of art until not too recently his works commanded the highest prices at auction and an artist that basically essential in the history and development of modern art we adore Van Gogh for this reason and also because he tends to push a lot of the right buttons an artist who was very lonely and alienated an artist who starved an artist who committed suicide and here is his death notice in the paper at Pontoise where it is said that van Gogh shot himself mortally wounded he did not die immediately thereafter so brought himself back to his room and died only a day later his doctor because as we all know he was extremely sensitive very troubled individual very very high-strung he was plagued by emotional problems and his doctor actually drew him on his deathbed and this is another reason which makes van Gogh so intriguing that an entire myth seems to have surrounded him an artist who was alienated cast out from society and artists who committed suicide all of this in a sense leaves a particular fascination around him that fascination takes on certain turns nowadays the idea that all conspiracy seems to shrouded his death now in the Daily Mail we read that van Gogh was actually murdered we have this also on Vanity Fair van Gogh's suicide or murder NCIS province the van Gogh mystery it just never end to add to all this of course he cut off his ear and that lends another valence to the van Gogh myth he sent it to a prostitute which of course sends all of the psycho biographers salivating trying to explain what is it about Van Gogh why did he do all of this and most people think of course that he was insane why else would you cut off your ear and sent it off to a prostitute this has fed an entire sort of Van Gogh industry this is a Kirk Douglas in the film lust for life MGM 1956 we have even a Vincent and CEO this is 1990 even a Benedict Cumberbatch appears on the web looking like van Gogh my personal favorite is actually a Keira cassavas dreams where this Japanese would-be painter goes back in time meets a van Gogh reenact this very famous painting that you probably all know about considered to be van Gogh's last work the wheat fields with crows that look menacing the three avenues or paths collapsing towards the spectator all of this gets reenacted in the film and the character even comes into a van Gogh painting so this love for Van Gogh I think has a great deal to do with the appreciation that we have for the artists in an hour art-historical vain as well it couldn't go a little bit too far we have overly commercialized Van Gogh you can get your story nice mug if you want more flowers to bloom you have Miracle Grow Oh purpose plant food if you like beer well here we have van Gogh again Holland beer from Bavaria even the Simpsons get into the act and if you want to wear something sexy here we go you have the van Gogh pan so what does that do to our art historical appreciation of Van Gogh and here just to become a little more serious why is Van Gogh so important why do we like him so much what is his place in history and Van Gogh is considered in fact a post-impressionist what does that mean that is not a very precise term it's something that catches pretty much everything that happens after Impressionism and it would be interesting I think for the benefit of any audience to try and ascertain what is Van Gogh's relationship to Impressionism so I've decided to bring a Hanwha in because I know he's gotten a bit of a bad rap recently especially around here and other places too and when we're in this work of 1873 is representing Monet painting at Chantal and this in itself is significant because it demonstrates how the Impressionists have overthrown tradition artists used to work in a studio some of them would of course sketch outside if they're interested in landscape painting but then would compile those sketches together in the finished work what we have with Impressionism with the invention of synthetic paints is the ability of the artist to paint outdoors to almost finish a work in its entirety outside the studio this symbolically is extremely powerful it means that the old traditional of doing things are rejected and the artist paints as Monet loved to say Bhuvana motifs meaning in front of nature and these are the kinds of paintings that monet painted which like Van Gogh's were also highly unpopular at the time precisely because they blurred the distinction between a finished work and a sketch the artist sought to paint sensation and as you can see what the artist does is eliminate all outline all of the brush works get broken down in these very small Adam ahyes strokes and without you eliminate without the outline everything blurs into everything else the impression is claimed that the outline does not exist in nature it's an imposition of the mind as a result the Impressionists rejected it here is Monsieur Claude speaking about his art Impressionism is only direct sensation when you go out to paint try to forget what object you have before you a tree house field or whatever merely think here is a little square of blue here an oblong distinct here a streak of yellow and painted just as it looks to you the exact color and shape until it emerges as your own naive impression of the scene before you I would like to paint the way a bird sings a good impression is lost so quickly it's terrible how the light runs out color any color lasts a second sometimes three or four minutes at most the critic asked and what sir is the subject matter of that painting the subject matter my dear good fellow is the light so the idea is the artist is a passive receptor for the impressions that come from outside and as Monet seem to have indicated in that statement light is ephemeral it is so short in terms of the impact it has that the artist has to paint very rapidly explaining the sketch like application of paint and more than that because the light changes so rapidly every moment in time gets recorded so that the cathedral Hawaa looks very different at nine o'clock than 9:15 then 9:30 then 9:45 all of which warrants a separate painting now when we come to Van Gogh we have a completely different interpretation of nature here we also have a sense that everything is in flux that everything changes but it is not the recording of sensation it is rather the animation of the landscape as a kind of reflection of the artists own emotional and psychological agitation his projection of his emotional state upon nature and as you can see the contour line reappears precisely because van Gogh seems to suggest that he is not painting the landscape as he sees it but how he feels it and you can see very very closely how he paints extremely rapidly with great intensity and in a manner that has very little to do with external reality but as a way of somehow communicating his own emotive state and we have now statements from Van Gogh that corroborates this distancing from Impressionism the neutrality and objectivity of recording sensation towards an investigation of the emotional and the subjective I want to touch people with my art I want them to say he feels deeply he feels tenderly instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me ostensibly what Monet is attempting I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully color expresses something by itself so let's think about this issue of color and how Van Gogh's interpretation and manipulation of it is radically different from that of the Impressionists here we find in this piece of night 1888 how van Gogh exaggerates the red the yellows that the sensation the recording of nature that is basically the core of impressionist intentionality it yields to something that is remarkably different this was going to have a tremendous impact an artist in the 20th century most notably the Folds artists who grouped around Matisse and who were called a by a French critic wild beast and these artists basically took what Guga and Van Gogh were doing one step further and loved the idea of color not as a means of description but as a means of expression this is a landscape by Matisse 1905 you can see the loose independent brushstroke you can see the swirling of nature the suggestion of motion energy dynamism that we saw in Van Gogh here is Andre Doha a colleague of Matisse where the same block-like patterns are highly reminiscent of Van Gogh as well as the dynamic energy we had mentioned a moment ago and maurice de Vlaminck who later in his life basically did the same painting over and over but around 1905 1906 he did a spectacular work as such as this landscape with dead wood and you can see in this detail the way color is completely arbitrary there is no connection to empirical experience the artists exaggerated sensation for expressive purposes this yields to this statement by Matisse exactitude is not truth which echoes another statement made by Van Gogh real painters do not paint things as they are they paint them as they themselves feel them to be this is a very important point it seems to suggest that the idea of truth which for the Impressionists was connected with empiricism with the observation of nature shifts is something more subjective and more personal the idea of recording reality is now considered superficial it's considered uninteresting and reality rather lies in distortion reality lies in how you can make a work of art more personal more private more reflective of your own subjective reality so the concept of truth shifts radically all of which can be blamed at least partially to what Van Gogh was doing we talk about technique as well as another important element in Van Gogh's bag of tricks and how influential he was in addition to his exaggeration of color here is a wonderful citation from Van Gogh quick work doesn't mean less serious work it depends on one's self confidence and experience in the same way Judy ha the lion hunter says in his book that in the beginning young lions have a lot of trouble killing a horse or an ox but that the old lions kill with a single blow of the paw or a well-placed bite and that they are amazingly sure at the job this idea of rapidity and spontaneity can be seen immediately in the same detail that I showed you a moment ago in a painting like this you can almost reconstruct the process of making in your mind you could imagine how the artist needed to manipulate the pigment in what direction he moved with what kind of pressure how did he apply the pigment you can almost reverse-engineer the painting and that in a sense is a way through which the artist establishes a mode of communication the kind of sympathetic empathetic response on the part of the spectator that's the canvas the materials are objects that require or certain overcoming on the part of the artist the material offers resistance and the artist will overcome that resistance this became extremely influential not just on Matisse and as collaborators but in Germany in a group called the Boca which in German means the bridge a group of young architecture students fell in love with van Gogh one of them is absolutely Kirchner in this book in this book in this painting girl on a divan you can see again the reintroduction of the contour lines the exaggeration of color the relationships become in fact even more violent more dissonant more clashing than what we have seen in the folds but more than anything you can see this emphasis on the process of making on the artist giving you enough clues that in your mind in your imagination you reconstruct the process of making here is another piece Erik heckle landscape in Ganga's you can see how the expressionist as their name indicates distort color form etc for expressive purposes that they see art as a kind of activity of struggle again the material offers resistance the artist overcomes that resistance here's another artist max Bechstein who became a member of this group River landscape 1907 we'll talk more about the presence of the Sun and the boats a little later in the lecture but you can see the alternation of color between yellow red orange blue and you can also see the independence of each individual brushstroke something that comes very very close to Van Gogh's precedent and in fact when Emile alder was joining this particular group he told them you guys shouldn't call yourself the bridge you guys should call yourselves van Gogh anja because your paintings look so much like van Gogh here's another example Carl Schmidt wrote loose and again these guys were all architecture students at the Technical hochschule in Dresden and their professor a certain streets a Schumacher said from 1905 all future members of the Booker began to my haha to draw in an extremely on Hidy fashion I attributed it to the influence of the van Gogh exhibition that was attracting attention in president at the time so here we have van Gogh being blamed Thank You effects that was actually a professor of mine in graduate school who taught me a lot of this stuff some of you know who he is Gert Schiff may he rest in peace that was his accent so anyway I can't take full credit for that anyhow so this idea of loosening execution and also that particular aspect of the work being reflective of the artists psychology is also seen in this piece by nine by Egon Sheela Austrian artists who represented his own likeness and as you can see in a very extreme manner again one has to think of the myth of Van Gogh as an insane artist and in many respects a Sheila plays up on this but I want to draw your attention and not just to the emphasis on the facial features and she's Yagami how that is considered to be a revelatory of the artists psychological and emotional state but the looseness of the execution here these particular strokes do not necessarily convey or describe anything but they're considered by the artist to be as much a revelation of the artists mental state as the depiction of his facial features one can say the same about this piece by kathe Kollwitz you can see that she depicts herself in the act of drawing in a sense in the act in the celebration of creativity but look at how she draws very very rapidly and that these kinds of sketches this celebration of spontaneity and improvisation is meant to be as much Avenue into her emotional state as anything that she depicts in terms of where this takes us here's another Dutch artist but much later in the 20th century now Willem de Kooning who took the goes and his emphasis on spontaneity improvisation to a higher power here we have the elimination of subject matter altogether and it is thus Russ and counterthrust lines and counter lines that ostensibly were created very rapidly although that probably is an illusion there are films of de Kooning working where he looks and stares at his painting for half an hour moves towards it creates a stroke and then moves back for another half an hour contemplating what he is doing although the painting appears like Van Gogh's quote about the Lions killing with one blow that it was created in two minutes but that of course is another way of communicating the idea that through execution through the physical motion of the body one has access to the mind that created it what is also fascinating about Van Gogh of course is how he uses symbols not in the conventional sense but the way in which ordinary objects ordinary events are laden with meaning and symbolism here's a wonderful citation from him the heart of man is very much like the sea it has it's storm it has its time and in its depth it has its pearls too so one looks at a painting such as this of boats that are simply resting on the shore and these particular elements even without a human presence are laden with meaning van Gogh rarely if ever represents both of leisure which wien finds in Impressionism all the time rather they are both their particular objects that recall the activity that takes place in them that these are boats that are helping individuals in their sustenance helping them gain their daily bread a day in and day out and you can see that they're painted again with a remarkable sense of intensity the line surrounds every object unlike what we have seen in Impressionism you can see the inside you can see every single element and look at how the mass are also extending outward as if they were projections of the artists on psychology some seem very solid the line seems very frayed and fragile remember the anchor here because we'll see that in a moment look at this particular painting again by Egon Schiele who did that self-portrait I showed you a moment ago the same kind of representation the boat without the person yet the boat recalls the activity that takes place in it the surrounding lines the agitated brushstroke and again the interior is depicted with such attention to detail and how each element seems to convey completely different emotional valence how again certain maths are depicted is very very sturdy and then these lines here these rows are extremely fragile almost like a human being in a very vulnerable state here are other representations by one of the members of the German bridge group that we spoke about a moment ago Carl Schmitt Ratliff again the boats on the shore and you can see that the artist here uses as his medium the wood cut the wood cut is an extremely strenuous kind of medium in which the artist has to gauge and his ability very very quickly and has to gouge particular indentations in a material that again offers resistance and you can see that each of these elements here these particular repeated strokes are an attempt on his part to repeat to approximate the constructive repeated strokes of Van Gogh in his painting here is max Peck shines again the boat restful on the shore I mentioned the anchor here it reappears as does the Sun an element that we will see recurring in Van Gogh's work extremely frequently and this wonderful citation from text ein van Gogh was father to us all now if we go back to his quote that the human mind is like the sea that the sea can be calm the sea of course can be tore mented so there's a remarkable range in the elements that van Gogh employs the boats on the sand the both restful versus the boat on the middle in the middle of the ocean the boats facing the turbulent sea and here he says the fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore this becomes a metaphor for the human condition and in fact the representation of boats on a storm-tossed sea was very very popular throughout our history especially in the 17th century but in the 19th century with Romanticism it takes on a completely different connotation namely that the human beings are no longer the masters of nature the Greeks had said that man was the measure of all things that man was the center of the universe and the Romantics overturning this hierarchy loved to represent both among the stormy sea to depict the vulnerability of humanity that it was located amongst powers amongst forces that were much more powerful that the human being and as a result stress our vulnerability amongst forces that were hostile or even indifferent to us the German Expressionists love this particular motif here's another print by tech Stein of the storm-tossed boat here's yet another nineteen forty nine boats in the storm and again the human presence disappears and yet the boat is enough to communicate the vulnerability of humanity in the myths of a nature that is much grander one finds this also in any Lotus works out both on the river Elbe and you can see that in the foreground we find the same kind of agitated brushwork that we had seen in that earlier van Gogh as if the artist is trying to communicate not just his emotional state but to reenact the energy and dynamism of nature that these individual strokes give you a sense of what it is like when different waves collide how they recreate the all of the energy of the environment even Kandinsky an artist who we normally think about as having pioneered abstraction also has a van Gogh face and in his early work you find representations of votes very much like those of Van Gogh with those very broad individual strokes seen as independent units in the foreground and the idea of a rapid execution as being somehow integral to his entire working process but even in his lace work even in pieces like this there are references to the storm-tossed boat I don't want to go into this in great detail but we know from sketches that these paintings that may look abstract or actually very representational this is a city on a hill these are human figures that are highly exaggerated these are riders of the Apocalypse because this is a deluge this is a cataclysm that is taking over European culture we find in this particular part of the painting another vote with oars as again in an evocation of that sense of the fragility of life and the vulnerability of the human being within the larger natural dimension now speaking of the natural dimension one of the great fascinations of Van Gogh was of course the night sky we have several citations from him that demonstrate this interest in great detail be clearly aware of the Stars and infinity on high then life seems almost enchanted after all I don't know anything with certainty but seeing the Stars makes me dream at the present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky it often seems to me that night is still more richly colored than the day having hues of the most intense violets blues and greens and this of course is the or among the most famous paintings that van Gogh executed the starry night where he again completely reversed our expectations we think of day as being extremely active and night as being a most more restful time here van Gogh represents the night as extremely dynamic as continuously influx with the Stars and the moon shining almost in an exaggerated manner this painting is also replete with symbolism the cypress is a symbol of death it is the only element that seems to connect the realm of the earth a terrestrial one and the realm of the sky the celestial one the only man-made object which is allowed to transgress this boundary is the spire of the church as if the artist is making out of this landscape a metaphor an allegory of life and rebirth life and Transfiguration you can see in this detail as a way in which van Gogh paints the way he applies the pigment it was a great deal of energy with a great deal of dynamism it seems almost sketch like in its intensity and look also at how he paints the evocation of artificial versus natural light how these particular elbow emblems of the light created by humanity is dwarfed by the greater light of nature this is not always the case van Gogh repeated this theme on several occasions in this starry night over the horn we find that there's almost an equilibrium between artificial and natural light and again some of the motifs that we have seen before like the boat we appear as well as figures in the foreground which we'll see in several of the upcoming slides so the idea of depicting the night which is extremely difficult to reverse these kinds of attentions that we pay to the day versus the evening were extremely influential on other artists this is Eugene Johnson a Swedish artists who depicts a street in Stockholm in a manner that is extremely reminiscent of the two paintings that I've showed you before again this attention to the rapidity of the execution encouraging the spectator to recreate the work in his or her imagination and the play of this artificial light in a way that fuses with the environment that merges the energy of nature and the energy of humanity staying in scandinavia at varda monk who is also fascinated with Van Gogh's work also depicted a starry night although his particular mood is more lugubrious working template aver II much attentive to the idea of a kind of organic biological shape that tends to take over all the elements so you can see that the tree the vegetation and the seashore all merge together in a single dark shadow a very very difficult to tell exactly what monk attempted to communicate by this shape but it is something that occurs very frequently in his work but the emphasis on the Stars something very very evocative in this piece is highly indebted to Van Gogh as is this piece by Emil alder again a member of the bridge group for a certain amount of time who is also fascinated by Van Gogh's work and wanted to replicate some of its effects intriguingly here as the artist eliminates all human presence as does monk but almost verges on abstraction employing such an economy of means that if one couldn't recognize say the little or the Big Dipper here it would almost be very difficult to tell how representational this piece was a German Expressionism in the early part of the 20th century was also remarkably influential on German artists after World War two and one of these was this man called AR tank who created this piece I and the cosmos a figure with starry sky almost representing this kind of first human being in a state of absolute wonder before the star and the idea that the stars represent mystery they represent something magical and that they represent human humanity's desire to know to understand the universe is clearly indicated how so many cultures have come up with different kinds of constellations all of which suggesting that the human being projects meaning onto the Stars projects meaning onto the universe and sees it as profoundly meaningful it's for this reason that many astronomers think that they were actually the oldest profession I know there's another profession that makes a somewhat similar claim but I'm just not going to get into that speaking of nature another topic of remarkable interest to Van Gogh were trees and here's some of his drawings of the 1880s which he describes in his letters such as this one in all nature for instance in trees I see expression and soul here is another drawing about which van Gogh writes the roots shows some tree roots on sandy ground I try to put sentiment into the landscape the convulsive passion is clinging to the earth and yet being half torn up by the storm I wanted to express something of the struggle for life in the black gnarled and knotty roots when you look at these drawings obviously they become examples of what John Ruskin almost dismissively called the pathetic fallacy namely the tendency among artists to project human emotions onto inanimate objects and Van Gogh is obviously doing this these trees don't look so much like something that exists outside the self as much as veins arteries nerve endings that are extremely distorted and in such a way as to express again his own anxiety there was an exhibition at the mass of these growing several years ago in which his image after image of these wonderful representations of trees the effect of which was mitigated by these two people that at some point parked themselves in front of one of these drawings and started to have a private conversation not even about the art but about something as completely unrelated I am a non-violent person strictly but if I had a machete at that point I don't know if I could have answered for my actions in any events I know that everyone here respects a museum etiquette and would never do anything of the kind so speaking about Van Gogh and after in his influence this idea of representing trees in this manners immediately picked up by Eagan Sheila again who works in a manner that is extremely rapid and gestural as you can see he also scratches his own signature into the pink layers as if to give an indication of how private and personal the paintings are that they're extensions of his own personality as are these trees again I made a comparison to arteries nerve endings and this is very much the way Sheila sees a tree as fragile as delicate as extending its branches outwards almost as if it were a human being you can see this in this piece as well 1912 twe in the wind where the tree is distorted in a remarkably unnatural way as if the tree tries to expand but is somehow contracted by an unseen force as if the artist sees himself into the tree countered by the forces of society that do not allow him to express his individuality or his singularity through his art Mondrian is not an artist that one would normally associate with Van Gogh his pieces being so rigorously geometrical mathematical and in equilibrium but just as Kandinsky's abstract work also has roots in Van Gogh's and so does Monte on early work this farm in evening 1906 also represents a kind of coloration which is a deeply embedded to Van Gogh but look at the representation of the tree how also it seems to be very very reminisce of those drawings that we had seen before this the red tree of 99 even more so to the extent that color is again distorted and exaggerated for expressive purposes and that the branches expand in a completely unnatural way a tendency which Mulder maintains even after he becomes influenced by Picasso and starts moving towards a greater and greater abstraction again I think the continuity between Van Gogh and monkey nose work is unmistakable and were it not for the influence of the cost went to visit him it-- have turned out to be another expressionist this piece is equally fascinating the road menders because the trees and our not represented as these thin and fragile branches but rather with very thick forms through which one has to look to see the human activity and this kind of oppressive affect was picked up by Gustav Klimt in this piece the avenue of schloss Conor Park where again it is through the trees that one sees human activity the trees themselves overtakes the image and appear much more powerful again uprooting upstaging the usual hierarchy between humanity and nature here it is always nature that plays the higher hand intriguingly Charles Burchfield the American artist also represented trees in this particular way and as you can see they move of their own volition of their own accord moving out of way of the Sun so that the spectator can get an immediate vantage point to see the celestial as well as the earthly realm together flowers and sunflowers are also part of this fascination with nature with trees etc one finds many representations of still lives in Van Gogh's work and they may appear at first sight to simply be the representation of the bouquet of flowers but the more you look at them again they seem to have that human quality that each one is represented like an individual created edged outside standing before let's say this a completely unclear background and even more intriguingly each of them is represented at a different stage in its life some are blooming standing upright others are beginning to decay and others are in the process of dying so simply by means of a single representation of a vase of flowers van Gogh begins to project on to them or to fuse them into a kind of allegory of life and death of bloom and decay all by means of a simple representation that does not have any overt symbolism but again is laden with meaning Mondrian picks up on this he represents this chrysanthemum with a kind of portrait light intensity as if it were animated with the kind of energy that one does not necessarily associate with nature but one associates with human beings look at this representation of a flower again in this thing's unmodulated background that is very typical of Van Gogh extremely intense color would look at how the flowers have a life of their own here how they're represented as if they were a kind of surrogate human presence the flower with whom Van Gogh of course is mostly associated is the sunflower as he himself says the sunflower is mine in a way your profession is not what brings home your weekly paychecks your profession is what you're put here on earth to do with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling so just as he associates his art with a spiritual calling just as he associates himself with the sunflower the two will become merged and this is a very famous representation of the sunflowers of 1888 and again what we had said about the irises can be said about this piece that this group of flowers which each represented as an individual they are not represented as a bouquet they're not represented as a group or as a Oh tality but each is singular highly individualized at a different process in the state of bloom and decay sometimes he represents these pieces these flowers with such remarkable intensity again as if they were surrogate presences also I want to draw your attention to these concentric lines as if they emanated a certain energy that moves from the inside out again as if you were meeting an individual said this is a person with a remarkable presence quite unlike what the Impressionists did where nature is seen from a distance where each plant is represented almost by a small touch of color remember what Monet said don't worry about what you're painting just focus on a little touch of red next to loo touch of blue next to a little touch of yellow this is remarkably unlike what van gogh does he basically goes down and looks at the plants from their level from their vantage points and represents them with this remarkable intensity Galia and Van Gogh lived together as probably many of you know and this particular painting of Gauguin's of Van Gogh painting a sunflower also exacerbated infuse the identification of the sunflower with van Gogh himself so much so that when an exhibition of Van Gogh was organized in 1892 after the artists death you can see that his name Vincent is immediately associated with the sunflower with the Sun motif we'll see a moment ago with a halo as if to suggest that this flower is an extension of Van Gogh's personality that you can project himself onto the sunflower and of course many artists picked up on this we start Klimt Egon Schiele er this is especially poignant image because you can see how narrow it is how these flower seems actually constrained within the parameters of the edge and again how it appears fragile as if it appears vulnerable as if it were a surrogate human presence the way Sheila's very much emphasized and identified with Van Gogh he was born the same year that van Gogh died and thought he was van Gogh reincarnated okay he's a little weird you know there's no denying that but that also explains a painting like this with the wilted sunflowers 1914 you can see the Sun is setting in the background and again the flowers are wilting another allegory of life and death this is seen throughout the early 20th century especially among the expressionist painters here is immune all the a wonderful watercolor or again you see two sunflowers highly erect meeting the Sun meeting nature and another one that is wilting so again the idea of the passage of time is evoked in this particular work just one sunflower before nature it's almost as if it's a human individual standing likelier in the storm the confrontation of one force and another which is greater which is going to survive and of course Mondrian represented these dying sunflowers as well again the influence of Van Gogh is alive and well even Charles Burchfield this interesting image rogues gallery 1916 were in front of all of these structures that are extremely stable in their effect giving you a sense of permanence and upwards height we have the sunflower that Rome was giving way to the force of gravity another representation of death if one wills this one even more so Charles buried September afterglow where the sunflower is losing all of its petals and again the Sun is setting all kinds of images all kinds of symbols that are reflecting van Gogh's influence even Man Ray the photographer also represented flowers with great attention to detail coming to their own vantage point giving you a sense of what the flower is like as an individual and this is way for a Mapplethorpe and even georgia o'keeffe it's actually wonderful to show one of her flowers that doesn't look like you-know-what and even an artist like John Mitchell known for her abstraction and also representing something which in the background is highly reminiscent of Van Gogh these particular sunflowers as late as 1980 the question of course is how do flowers also relate to people in certain respects in this piece by Mondrian devotion the lady here is looking at the flower almost as a mode of inspiration something to aspire to the sunflower can have the opposite connotation in this piece by Kirchner it almost seems as if the flower is imprisoned in the interior it seeks the light from outside just as the figure also seems constrained alienated separated from the external world in this piece by Sheila again you can see the correlation between the human being and the plant the plant has that same fragile and vulnerable effect that we saw in his other sunflower and so does the human being he seems almost as if he is decaying himself as if his body is not alive but in a state of decomposition and this wonderful piece by Amazon Kiefer where a human being lies on the ground were not assure we're not sure whether he's asleep or dead but look at the flowers that are blooming from his corpse almost and again they're in different states of life and death but one almost has a feeling and that there is a sense of the human body fertilizing the ground allowing all of this energy to emerge from nature and even Andy gets into the acts what does it mean here I'm not really sure I'll let him stop for himself so nature and the divine nature becomes also the receptacle not just for human projection but also for the presence of divinity on earth van gogh says if one he was in need of something grand something infinite something that makes one feel aware of God one need not go far to find it so his representations of nature run a very very large gamut he was interested in agriculture how is it that human beings employ the land how do they use it for sustenance and this was remarkably influential on France mark another German expressionist artists but sometimes when finds that nature is almost protected by a divine presence which is not articulated or visualized in the literal representation of a divinity but through the orb of the Sun which seems to give life to the plants how the trees almost seem to respond to it and again we mentioned those concentric circles and forms they emanate from the Sun to such a degree that they imbue the entire painting with a sense of spirituality even though the subject is secular it has a religious connotation and one could almost imagine that artists of this time period are thinking how do we invest a secular subject with a religious connotation with religious meaning and spirituality without having to revert back to conventional traditional Christian iconography like the crucifixion the lamentation etc in this particular piece again the son is dead center it almost seems to be a kind of protective force giving assent to the sower who connects with nature who lives his life by in a sense connecting with the soil and being able to gain his sustenance from it there are many interpretations of this painting some people connected to some of the parables in the Bible with which van Gogh probably was familiar since he wanted to be a pastor and a preacher himself except he was kicked out because he was overly zealous and the idea that the artist saw that the sower throws his grains and then they're picked up by the crows meaning that his work is not necessarily going to be fulfilled or the idea that one has to till the soil and the soil has to be receptive but to my mind this is not necessary to understand this work it seems to be more that the protective force of the Sun is giving a sense is giving agreement to what the soul is doing in this particular piece one finds that the Sun is immediately behind the sower acting like a halo again giving sanction to his activity this influenced Van Gogh to create more scenes where human beings are represented before the night sky or the sky of the day where the orb of the Sun and Moon act as divine presences that protect these individuals this you can see in Kirchner's painting moonrise soldier and maiden highly influenced by Van Gogh in its technique and probably from this piece which I show you in a terrible black-and-white reproduction only because this painting was destroyed in World War two but monk was also influenced by connecting the spheres of the Sun and Moon to human beings to allow it to connect with their lives in this particular respect the moon and it's a reflection in the water acts as a way of designing human beings so this is why monk called this the lonely one and other times it has a connotation much closer to Van Gogh that the representation of the Sun is a manifestation of God's divine presence on earth that there's something about the representation of this natural phenomena that almost has a supernatural connotation this was then picked up by the German expressionist these honors the son by Schmidt wrote loose again these human beings almost acknowledge and respond to the Sun as if it were this life-giving force something not just natural but almost supernatural in the way it acknowledges our life on Earth and gives us sustenance gives us power gives us our ability to endure you can see this in this painting by HECO called springtime again it's almost as if the Sun appears something we all appreciate in Boston especially this is something here that gives you a sense that the entire painting was extremely dark all of a sudden the light appears the Sun emerges from the clouds and look at how the body of the landscape moves and is animated by this particular appearance it's almost as if the trees respond to the light of the Sun as if they were animate rather than in Adam at objects one sees this in all a min Aldous sunset the Sun explodes as it seems to move downwards closer to the sunset the colors are highly exaggerated but other artists also saw the Sun perhaps almost as a premonition of disaster as one sees this in this work by Otto Dix called dawn where the crows obviously taken from that last painting of Van Gogh that we saw a moment ago seems to be extremely ominous in its presence this was done just two years before World War one and Charles Burchfield again who represents nature who represents trees animated responding to the light coming from the Sun sometimes in a positive and sometimes in a more ominous manner one doesn't necessarily always one cannot always anticipate how these artists want to use the particular symbolism they've inherited from Van Gogh one has to be very sensitive to the nuances that appear the same can be said about Max Ernst this work is very reminiscent of Van Gogh in its execution again this orb seems to appear out of nowhere it seems to be emanating a kind of life and energy of its own but in this piece it seems to have a completely different effect to the extent that again it seems as though a Cataclysm has taken place that this particular building or this strata of Earth has become fossilized and look also at the plants they seem to be again in a state of decay and death now if Van Gogh was so interested in nature you thought oh oh interested in how human beings relate to it more specifically workers individuals who labor in the fields and who act in a way that is very instinctive I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields the implication is that the artist is also a worker indicating the great deal of identification that van Gogh has with the workers that he paints and the idea is that these workers work instinctively just as he does he says a weaver who has to direct an inter weave a great many little thread has no time to philosophize about it but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think what acts and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it so this idea of the worker as an individual who acts in a sort of non intellectual and instinctive manner this is something that the artist empathizes with as well as their plight as individuals who are subordinate who are the lower end of the social spectrum look at this procession takes out the ViCAP take hold it in the wave of the weavers highly reminiscent of the piece by Van Gogh that we saw a moment ago here are representations of Labor's whose bodies are deformed deformed because the labor they engage in overwork certain muscles and under works others so their physique is distorted as a result and Van Gogh wants to strike a kind of fine line between on the one hand being sensitive to their plight to their condition in society but also to give them a certain sense dignity as well ahead of the peasant here this highly reflective of certain tendencies at the time the worker becomes a symbol of the lower classes we find this in monk where again they were given a certain sense of dignity workers in the snow and sometimes represented as tired as having gone through an extremely long day and it is basically their burdens that become emphasized this also is true of Ludwig Meisner the coal miners of 1912 again a very dark painting very appropriate to the subject matter van Gogh emphasized this particular idea because he saw himself as a worker depicts himself on his way to work just like any other laborer and here we have images of these labors the reaper which influenced monk we have another digger which influenced Schmidt Ratliff here we have his diggers after me a which influenced height now and again all of these images seem to reflect the impact of Van Gogh but van Gogh being very sensitive and also very sensitive to religion represents workers in connection with a church we had spoken about how the circle of the Sun was a kind of protective presence over the sower in the same way the church almost gives protection to this lonely worker that one sees and the very front of the drawing and look at this congregation leaving the Reformed Church and now and again it's almost as if the church functions as a protective element that these individuals despite the fact that they are the lower classes they nonetheless are given the protection the sanctity of the church they believe and their faith in a sense gives them that very same sustenance one finds this in Mandaluyong as well the worker in the foreground and the church in the background now van Gogh did not necessarily eliminate political commentary from his work such as the bearers of the we're here obviously emphasizes the burdens of the poor this was picked up by Max Peck Stein in this piece and even images that were somewhat more benign like the weaver with baby in an armchair was the influence of the source for kathe Kollwitz the end of the weavers rebellion where after having rebelled individuals have been killed and are brought back to their own to their own house for burial later but you can see that the sense of tragedy has been picked up by colvett in this particular view in order to make other Van Gogh's work something that is more politically poignant the idea that the worker must be represented with dignity is seen in this particular piece the fisherman this was picked up again by tech Stein and these representations of the postman were highly influential on other German expressionist Bechstein again and here we have van Gogh on his way to work influencing Francis Bacon who represented his own variation on this theme van Gogh got very near to the violence of life itself it's true to say that when he painted a field he was able to give you the violence of Grass think of the violence of the grass he painted it's one of those violence and abominable things one finds the same idea highly influential on Reiner feting Van Gogh and Mauer very recent artist who paints again van Gogh as an exemplar of German Expressionism as an exemplar of the individual who goes to work every day who emphasizes with the poor who emphasizes with the downtrodden if van Gogh loves workers because of their Nighy state because of their innocence he also loved children and said that I think that I see something deeper more infinite more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and crew lose or laugh because it sees the sun shining on its cradle and here you have him depict children again like plants he goes to their level he goes to their vantage point and depicts the world almost as if through their eyes see this in this particular image to the child was an orange surrounded by nature without an adult in sight this gets picked up by HECO who represents the child and all of the energy of his brushstroke as an emanation of the child's energy as if the child is full of some kind of dynamism that the adult lacks in this particular painting van Gogh represents the child and has the mother fused into the background as if she doesn't exist it's the child that's the center of attention again Kokoschka picks up on this the mother's hands are here but her face is nowhere to be seen and Egon Schiele er did very much the same thing the child is the center of attention the child is animated its eyes are open the mother almost is sleeping the mother is fading into the background other artists painted children on their own terms like Kokoschka did here scene in a world of their own floating before the void that is completely without any kind of descriptive detail and this piece by monk is quite fascinating family on the country road you can see that the side the child again steals the show in the foreground and the other adults become older as they move into the background again an allegory of life and death and the child becomes the force that drives society this is a wonderful image again by monk the fairytale forest where the children are almost lined up in the foreground and the tree becomes begins to take on of these rows of trees almost kind of supernatural feeling something magical something enchanted that nature becomes what the children see in it not what the adults does and there is no greater homage to the glory to the energy to the dynamism to the spontaneity of children as in this piece by no the ninety-nine widely dancing children as if energy emanates from them without any kind of social control children left to their own devices act in ways that are purely instinctive purely spontaneous without the control of adult culture animals also are a figure very prominently in this side of things to the extent that animals are also instinctive non-intellectual they do not think they act in a way that's purely natural but what happens when human beings try and control them and force them to do things that they don't want to do you can see how trap the animal is this cart with red and white ox this gets picked up by Franz Marc who loved animals and so immediately in what van Gogh was doing a kind of new subject matter to investigate these subhuman forms of intelligence dead sparrow by Van Gogh again an interest in death in the cycles of life the dead Sparrow by Franz Marc here is a hand with a ball and the cat's van Gogh and here we have another van Gogh the Kingfisher again the representation of the animal on its own terms in its own territory and this becomes very important for mark in this representation of cats and I have a wonderful quote from Mark van Gogh is the most authentic the greatest the most poignant painter I know no wonder van Gogh also represented cows sometimes after old masters like Jakob Jordan which is obviously the inspiration for this particular piece which in turn becomes the inspiration for Franz Marc you can see the exaggeration of color it's used for expressive purposes as we said a moment ago but even more importantly look at how the curvature of the landscape is echoed in the curvature of the horses as if to suggest that these merge with the environment the energy that animates the invite and animates the animals and the artists almost wants to understand how does the animal see the world how does the animal in a sense have knowledge that we ourselves do not have because they're more in tune with nature if the artist was interested in animals the artist was also interested in an inanimate objects look at this representation of the bridge bridges become very very important in some in the iconography of some artists of the 20th century like Mulder who executes the piece again with remarkable van Gogh s execution but what is fascinating to me is the exaggeration of perspectives the rush of space which gives feelings of claustrophobia which gives feelings of extreme constriction psychological as well as physical this obviously was at the core what monk did in the spring evening on the Karl Johan and obviously in his iconic painting The Scream where again these particular lines move towards us rather than recede in the background and give us a feeling of extreme austra phobia also intriguing is the way van gogh builds up his bridges stroke by stroke just as the bridge is built brick by brick and the solidity of these forms contrast with the fragility here of the lines and the cords this tension is I think quite remarkable and it gets picked up by Egon Schiele where again he seems to build the bridge piece by piece and again one has the fragility of these lines and these ropes highly indicative of Van Gogh's impact this particular work again is extremely famous vanko's bedroom in alle and it's an inanimate object it's just a room with a bed with chairs with paintings but it is Van Gogh's beds it is Van Gogh's chairs it is Van Gogh's paintings everything here is infused with the kind of personal and private quality so that the space doesn't become a kind of inanimate space it becomes projected and full of human emotion it's almost as if it is a surrogate self many psychologists began to see architecture as a kind of metaphor for the mind that's just as a building has many stories corridors and room so does the mind have different spaces different areas the conscious vietcong the sub conscious the preconscious etc and again think about the recession of space the very claustrophobic perspective that gets picked up by Egon Sheela in this particular representation of his room in oil Nolen back and again think of the way Sheila emphasized with Van Gogh saw himself as van Gogh reincarnated just as van Gogh depicted the whole of the asylum again these corridors that have multiple points of exit and entry so did Sheila represents a prison where he was sentenced to spend some time because some of his models were exposed to pornographic drawings that he did and so he found himself as a kind of martyred Saint just as van Gogh felt himself to be martyred in the asylum these inanimate objects also take the form of chairs here this is a chair that van Gogh painted with a candle and a book because it was Gauguin's chair so he missed his friend who with whom he quarreled his friend left in a hurry and the way in which van Gogh represents his missing of this individual who was so important to him was to represent the object in which that individual sat as a kind of surrogate individual the chair is symbolic of the individual who employed it it is not an inanimate object and the Wonder van Gogh represented his own chair very much the same way and Egon Sheila also represented chairs with the same kind of intensity even anthem Keefer and contemporary artists represented this work lobos's for Van Gogh at the center of which is again another chair as a surrogate representation of this individual who employs it van gogh was also fascinated with books so often i visit a visit to a bookshop has cheered me reminding me that there are good things in the world so here are these representations of books that are again symbolic of the meaning the knowledge that resides in them and anthem Keefer made a similar representation and look at this particular still life by Van Gogh the Bible all of which represents in many respects the idea of the Bible as a book that has weight as a book that has physicality but also a book that employs or that encapsulates all the knowledge and wisdom within it and as you can see it works the particular novel that is immediately in front of it and Anson T fir represented this piece the book which is obviously an analogy to the leaving of the Jews from Egypt during the exodus crossing the Red Sea and because of course the Jews are the people of the book this was also represented in this piece by Kiefer Martin Heidegger because Heidegger was an extremely important German philosopher but a German philosopher who also agreed and gave his loyalty to the Nazis the Nazis who burned books so here Kiefer is representing the profound irony of an individual who is meant to be the repository of wisdom but who was also contributing to knowledge just as he destroyed it at the same time thank you very much [Applause] [Applause] I'll be more than happy to entertain any questions if you have a question please raise your hand we'll bring the microphone to you and we ask that anyone who's leaving now please do so quietly thank you very much for such a wonderful lecture you're very welcome I wonder if you could comment on the theory that perhaps van Gogh was killed by accident not maybe murdered on purpose but killed apply accident I know you probably read the research that's been done and it's a compelling kind of story at least to me I think there is very so little concrete evidence and being an art historian rather than a forensic scientist I'm really in no position to judge that evidence it seems to me that he probably did commit suicide I can't prove it one way or the other but I think the onus if anything that he was murdered probably resides on the people who make that claim he was extremely troubled as we know emotionally as to whether he was insane again I'm not in a position to judge but there may be alternative explanations to the more fantastic hypotheses that people like to bring forth in order to bring attention to them rather than on Van Gogh for example why did he cut off his ear why did he send it to a prostitute there other explanations besides the oh he was a lunatic one which I find perhaps more compelling van Gogh was a great admirer of the CFC and if you read the notes from underground if you read crime and punishment the idea of saving a prostitute is a very very prominent one in those particular books and Van Gogh may have taken this very much to heart and wanted to enact some of these ideas in his own life what I think may have exacerbated his problems as as intense as they were to begin with because he was so high-strung is that having so little to eat he sometimes consumed his own paints and as a result must have been poisoned as a result and this may have exacerbated his emotional problems his sense of isolation his sense that he was not appreciated by his public it must have been very difficult to live by yourself without any positive feedback being supported by your brother and having no positive response from your peers from your public especially for someone who said I want people to think that I feel deeply that I feel so powerfully about things so he may have botched his suicide this happens I think quite frequently and as a result did not die straightaway as to whether was an action I really can't say I think I hold to the traditional view and maybe because as I've said I'm not I'm not qualified to evaluate the evidence you need NC is advanced to come and and sort of settle the issue definitively but even so more than a hundred years after the fact the trail goes cold as the lingo has it and it's very very difficult to reconstruct these particular events with any kind of precision so I'm sorry to be evasive but that's the only answer I can provide next question back here I enjoyed this lecture very much but I'm wondering many of the paintings that she showed van Gogh's influence in where German or Scandinavian is there's something in the psyche of the Germans or the Scandinavians that is more into I can see videos I'm here okay I'm just wondering many of the examples you showed we're from Germany or scandinavian say is there something in the psyche of the germans or the skin and navy that are more attractive to van gogh or would we find an influence of van gogh in spain and italy and france well i would show a few Frenchmen but you're absolutely right that the influence of Van Gogh was far more powerful in Germany and Scandinavia and there seem to have been the kind of debate that raged around this period and even a little earlier as to whether there was a different temperament a different artistic temperament in the north versus the south now you can you can narrow the question down or this particular topic by saying that in the South particularly in Italy and in Greece there was the survival of classical antiquity and so a particular way of looking at the world which was more cerebral more intellectual and this spawned the Italian Renaissance in the north in Germany in Scandinavia the influence of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome was nowhere near as powerful and you found particularly in the Middle Ages a way of representing reality that was seen as more emotional now I don't want to make these gross broad generalizations about national temperament but many people in Scandinavia and in Germany saw their artistic temperament as being very different as being more emotional as being more psychological and as a result more profound then the intellectual work that basically was generated from the influence of the Renaissance and the influence of classical antiquity and Van Gogh was seen as central to this particular kind of manifestation they were books published on Van Gogh in this particular time precisely praising him as evocative of this northern spirit and that leads that opens another can of worms because Heidegger who was proto Nazi approach appreciated van Gogh very much and wrote about him and yet the Nazis denounced this entire tendency of Expressionism of emotional painting of distortion for emotive reason as being degenerate so I think there is a duality that many people struck between Northern Europe and southern Europe and Van Gogh is being highly reflective of it and then in Germany there are other tensions between individuals who saw this as a a particular kind of quality highly reflective of the Germanic temperament and others who strove against it so it's a very complicated picture but I think you hit the nail right on the head that his influence was much more popular in that area of Europe for these reasons very precisely you see you see very many influences of Van Gogh in in American art apart from the computer example he showed us of Georgia O'Keeffe sunflowers and whatever they didn't see with too much and also how is it influencing contemporary art these are German artists who work today like Arnold Rainer who represent Van Gogh in this very sketch like application of pain okay this is another segment that I was going to talk about [Music] this is Reiner feting who represents van Gogh as an exemplar of Expressionism relating to the question that was just asked after World War 2 the majority of German artists wanted to eliminate Expressionism from let's say any kind of references they made precisely because the Association was made between Expressionism and this German spirit so artists in Germany painted abstractly because abstraction was considered a international idiom not anything that had nationalistic connotation in the 1970s and 80s certain German artists wanted to go beyond this and wanted to reclaim the expressionist heritage as their own not because they necessarily believed that there was a national connection between Expressionism and German identity but because they rejected the idea of this taboo being imposed upon and they thought that instead of hiding these connections they should be brought to light it was almost as if these artists and the culture as a whole wanted to have nothing to do with the Nazi past or all of the implications that is brought forth and as a result therefore swept everything under the rug these artists wanted to say look Expressionism is our legacy and we should address it we should reflect it in our art so here he represents van Gogh and the Mauer Mauer means the wall and the wall of course has connotations of Germany being divided at that time this is another piece by Van Gogh the portrait of the peasant and setting represents himself as a kind of anguish creature so this is Van Gogh influencing modern art here is an or contemporary art this is a freedom an Han represents Van Gogh and represents van Gogh here who looks more like Kirk Douglas than he looks like Van Gogh which means that in the postmodern period what we have is not just the artist making a reference to a symbol but referencing how that symbol has been employed by others so it's not just a van Gogh it's van Gogh being played by Kirk Douglas and again being referenced by an artist this is a wonderful piece by Enzo cooky again this is van Gogh but remember what we had said about the Sun now the Sun merges with the artist's eye so the tears and the Sun become one in the same TARDIS post-modernism is not only reinvestigating Expressionism but having a kind of ironic take on it this is Robert Cole scoffs I mean I don't know a picture speaks a thousand words you can see it's extremely it's not derogatory it's it's sarcastic but sarcastic in a good way as is Roy Lichtenstein who represents that same room that I showed you a moment ago and you know how van Gogh pain and this is how Lichtenstein pains right so it's finding a way of referencing Van Gogh with the technique with a style that's completely inappropriate unlike the German expressionist who use his work because it was emotive because it was spontaneous because it distorted form here the artist picks up on Van Gogh but paints and represented it represents his pieces in a way that's completely inimical to the original intent which one can't blame Lichtenstein for doing because Van Gogh did this too he also quoted the Lacroix he quoted me a he quoted me again which then was the inspiration for Picasso and so this particular piece was then picked up I listed Stein one more time but in different ways so he represents things in a style that very van Gogh asked and a style that's very neutral and almost looks as though it was painted by machine and this is the way I wanted to end the like sure is that when van Gogh said it must be good to dine the knowledge that one has done some truthful work and to know that as a result one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after and I wanted to say this Vincent you had succeeded [Applause] so thank you so much for asking that question it allowed me to finish my talk thank you all for coming

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 530,121

Keywords: van gogh, painting, art, art history, dutch art, european art

Id: pzOt_QtEVgg

Length: 86min 22sec (5182 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016

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